


Fear Itself

by Paperclippe



Category: ATWOOD Margaret - Works, Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age - Various Authors, Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Abominations (Dragon Age), Anders - Freeform, Apostates (Dragon Age), Chantry Issues, Circle Tower, Circle of Magi, Demons, Fear, Fear of Death, Half-Hanged Mary, Inspired by Poetry, Mage Life, Mage Origin, Mage Rebellion, Mage Rights, Mage-Templar War, Mages, Mages and Templars, Mages vs. Templars, Margaret Atwood - Freeform, One Shot, Poetry, Quote, Rite of Tranquility, Short, Short One Shot, Templars, Templars (Dragon Age), The Chantry, Tranquil Mages, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 06:18:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8879230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paperclippe/pseuds/Paperclippe
Summary: What they never tell you about magic is how much it hurts.
I wasn’t a proper initiate; I was too old, I was too intentionally free. Didn’t I know what I had been doing, after all? What kind of life I was living, and didn’t I know I was putting all of Thedas at risk by eking out a meager living collecting and selling herbs in the market, didn’t I know I was one of those apostates giving all magekind a bad name by daring not to be confined and controlled and almost assuredly abused?
Didn't I know?





	

_ Tough luck, folks, _

_ I know the law: _

_ you can’t execute me twice _

_ for the same thing. How nice. _

 

_ I fell to the clover, breathed it in, _

_ and bared my teeth at them _

_ in a filthy grin. _

_ You can imagine how that went over. _

 

_ Now I only need to look _

_ out at them through my sky-blue eyes. _

_ They see their own ill will _

_ staring them in the forehead _

_ and turn tail. _

 

_ Before, I was not a witch. _

_ But now I am one. _

 

-Margaret Atwood, “Half-Hanged Mary”

  
  


What they never tell you about magic is how much it hurts.

They tell you how much it hurts other people. They tell you that you’re a danger to your family, to your friends, to society at large. They tell you you’re less than human, less than Dalish, less that whatever you were born into without explaining why that might be. They tell you you’re a burden on the people around you, that you need to be locked away, watched, denied the basic freedoms that even criminals can claim once they’ve served their time, because you, forever you, due to an accident of birth, are a constant criminal.

Sure, that all hurts.

But that’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about real pain.

It starts as a throbbing behind your eyes. In your ears. You can feel it in your teeth, under your fingernails, in the hollow places in your chest. You’re not being squeezed, you’re squeezing yourself, sucking yourself in from the outside. Sucking power from the air, the ground, the water, the Fade, the spark of life that makes you you. You’re taking all of that into yourself and spitting it back out again - sometimes it looks like fire or ice, it burns or freezes, but all of that is deception. Sometimes you’ll see one of us who tells it like it is, spitting magic in a raw, primal form, and you can see the shape of unbridled energy in its omnipresent shapelessness, and you can really know then that magic is power. It’s not  _ a _ power, it is  _ the _ power. All power. The power in the stones, in the sea, the spirits, in every living thing, channeled with presence. With purpose.

And you expect that not to hurt?

It fades. It fades or there would be no mages for the templars to control. And perhaps the mages who learn it young, who are nurtured and understood, who come from Tevinter or maybe the rare and ever rarer Circles where magic is treated as an ability and not a deformity, maybe those mages who don’t have to swallow their power even as it eats them from the inside out, maybe they only feel the tingle, the warmth, the rough shuddering sensation that comes with the release of the energy inside of them.

I was not raised that way.

My parents were not unkind. My parents did not beat me or hide me or make me feel unclean for what I was.

It was what I saw behind their open eyes that made me push my magic deep down into the very blackest pits of me, made me lie and say no, I could be completely  _ normal _ if that was what they wanted me to be, needed me to be.

I saw fear.

They were afraid of me; afraid in the night when I had bad dreams that were almost certainly only the bad dreams of youth; afraid when I came home belligerent and inconsolable in the throes of my first brush with rejection; afraid when fellow mages were snatched off the streets and whisked away to Maker knows where - Circles? Prisons? Worse? - after the first whispers of rebellion whisked around the city like patches of heavy fog blown around by the morning breeze, and I, safe in my own home, away from prying eyes and suspicious ears, ranted and raved that  _ they couldn’t do this to us _ .

And afraid of themselves.

How could they, two perfectly  _ normal _ people, not a whiff of magic on either side of the family tree, give birth to this - this thing? This mage? And what were they to do with me? Our Circle was not a good Circle. Our templars were not understanding. Our Chantry was not a safe place. So they did what good people would do, they kept me at home. Kept me quiet.

They kept me as long as they could.

Somehow the templars knew.

Maybe it’s one of their powers, given to them by their habitual imbibing of lyrium, knowing the thing by being the thing, naming the thing by claiming the thing, but with false magic on their breath and in their veins they pegged me for a mage, a  _ secret _ mage, an  _ apostate _ , as though any fucking mage out in the world, who was not part of a Circle who had their wits about them would be anything besides a  _ secret _ mage and dear ser you can take your accusations and shove them - 

Well, I’m fairly confident you can tell how my interaction with the local patrol went.

So they took me, and they shoved me.

They shoved me in a dark cell.

I wasn’t a proper initiate; I was too old, I was too intentionally free. Didn’t I know what I had been doing, after all? What kind of life I was living, and didn’t I know I was putting all of Thedas at risk by eking out a meager living collecting and selling herbs in the market, didn’t I know I was one of  _ those apostates _ giving all magekind a bad name by daring not to be confined and controlled and almost assuredly abused?

Didn’t I know?

Oh, I thought I knew, let me tell you. I thought I knew and I was wrong.

They never intended to initiate me, but that much I figured. I thought they meant to make me Tranquil, meant to cut me off from the source of my powers, turn me into a stooge to shine their shoes and polish their armour and grovel before them because I literally would not be able to know or care what I was doing once they slammed that sunburst on my forehead. That thought was bad enough, but naively, I thought, at least I would be alive. There were some who said it was a fate worse than death but they were, I reasoned, speaking with the unique privilege of being alive, and those who denied the Circle and chose death over mental dismemberment were simply braver than I.

I thought that at first.

I thought, let them make me Tranquil. Then all my struggles would be over.

And then I saw the Tranquil. Not as I had seen them in the market, living what I thought was the same life as mine, selling handicrafts and potions and enchantments from a respectful, cooperative distance; I saw them up close, saw their unblinking gazes, heard their uninflected voices, swallowed their subtle commands, commands they could only give when having them handed down from on high, having no agency, not even remembering who they were or where they had come from but insisting they were happier now because if they couldn’t be upset then they couldn’t not be happy and I knew in a moment, I knew in a breath, that the people who had turned down that fate were in equal measure heroes and cowards because to lose oneself that entirely, to have no concern, no fear, no remorse, no anger, surely that is some fearful kind of freedom, but freedom only insofar as one can be free to do with oneself what one wants within the confines of their prison walls once everyone else has turned their backs and thrown away the key. One can do anything, so long as one can do nothing.

And in short, I was afraid.

It didn’t matter. That was never my fate anyway.

What the templars fear most are abominations, demons inhabiting the bodies of mages, harmful spirits linking themselves to their corporeal hosts through the connection to the Fade that both entities share. What the templars claim to want to do is to find a way to separate demon from mage without separating mage from head - or so they claim they want to, but a headless mage is a problem solved, after all - and without the three or more man ritual that involves, alas, cooperation from other mages, and only rarely succeeds.

But you can’t just go around experimenting on Circle mages.

You can, however, just go around experimenting on apostates whom you’ve snatched off of the street and deemed a threat to Thedas.

They put a demon in me.

They’re waiting for it to take control.

I can feel it there, now, in that space behind my eyes, in the moments where I am free of thought and I think I can hear someone speaking to me. I’ve heard that some mages succumb immediately, that they and the demon are one and the same from the moment of inception. 

If this were true for all mages, no one would fear abominations walking around in public, unseen, unknown.

I’ve heard them say that there was that mage who was such a secret abomination, living with his demon for years. Maybe so, but I don’t think that those are the sorts of demons that make you bring down a Chantry.

Those are different demons.

No, those sorts of demons are the ones who lock you in cell, who put a malicious spirit in your mind, who make you afraid of the dark even though the only thing in the dark with you is you.

Those sorts of demons make you hurt all over again.

I don’t know what’s going to happen now. I hope when it’s all over, this demon lets me go. I hope it’s not already so much a part of me now that it takes me with it when I go. I don’t think I believe in the Maker, but I have seen the Fade, and I hope that there is some kind of peace for me there.

I hope this doesn’t hurt.


End file.
